The primary purpose of this study was to identify and secure perceptions of what personal and institutional factors influenced and attracted adult students to enroll in four year institutions in Oklahoma. The secondary purpose was to compare student responses by institution. The more notable findings include: (1) dominant personal factors as to why adult students in this study returned to college were reportedly to improve/advance themselves, especially as it relates to their career; (2) flexible class scheduling was reported to be the most important institutional function for recruiting adult students, with academic quality and institutional costs of education next in importance; (3) almost 90% of respondents reported being under 45 years of age; (4) almost 85% reported commuting fewer than 50 miles to class; (5) approximately 90% reported enrolling each fall and spring (6) approximately twice as many respondents who returned to college reported they did so because it was more important to them to complete an unfinished degree than to begin a degree. Conclusions drawn from this study are as follows: (1) adult students appear to be unlikely to enroll in classes meeting more than three times a week; (2) adult students in Oklahoma may no longer be described …

The effect of an interdisciplinary algebra/science course on students' critical thinking skills was examined. A traditional college algebra course was used as a comparison group. The students in the sample enrolled in college algebra and then half were randomly placed into the interdisciplinary course. A quasi-experimental pretest-posttest comparison group design was used. The Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal was used to measure the students' critical thinking skills. This instrument consists of an overall critical thinking score as well as five subscores in the areas of Inference, Recognition of Assumptions, Deduction, Interpretation and Evaluation of Arguments. It was found that the students in the interdisciplinary course made greater gains in the overall critical thinking score as well as in four of the five subscores. However, the differences in the gains made in the two courses were not statistically significant. Disregarding course, other factors that were found to be closely related to critical thinking were Composite ACT, grade received in the course, Math ACT and grade point average. It was also found that students whose majors were in the Schools of Arts and Letters or Science and Technology scored higher on critical thinking than students whose majors were in the Schools of Business …